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May 16, 2012

Mind your mouth

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to participate in a short mindfulness retreat. As is standard for such things, the participants were encouraged to remain silent and to pay close attention to everything that took place in each moment of time -- mental states, bodily signals, and of course the external environment. This will sound a bit strange, but one of the peak experiences of my day was the midday lunch break. In my everyday life, I tend to scoff something down, usually while sitting at my desk or perhaps even while driving my car. What a different kind of experience to sit on a riverbank savouring a piece of fruit, contemplating its aromas, textures, flavours and even the life course of this perfect little piece of nourishment on its path from field or tree to my mouth. I can still remember lots of details of that lunch--the way the wind felt on my skin while I was eating, the sound of a nearby windchime mixing with the sounds of moving water, the bright sun in my eyes on that cool, fall day. Now, imagine combining that kind of mindfulness with the experience of eating food but this time not a banana pulled out of a lunchbox but instead with food at its source: the mushroom that grows near the gnarled stump of a tree or the tender shoots of a dandelion plant peeking out from a crack in the sidewalk. How would it feel to have to pay that much attention to your surroundings, not just for an afternoon exercise in mind-sharpening, but in order to survive? In my research on wayfinding, one of the strongest themes I've noticed is that those cultures in which one finds the most highly cultivated sense of place and space were also characterized by this exquisite sensitivity to one's surroundings--a kind of mindfulness. And what inevitably followed from this kind of place tuning was a deep reverence. What if there was some way to capture a little glimpse of how that kind of reverent connection to place might feel? Can modern, urban human beings live off the land? And if they do, what new connections might form between themselves and the sidewalks under their feet? Or with one another? Well, an ambitious project by the fabulously clever and creative group Spurse, called Eat Your Sidewalk, has been proposed to answer exactly these kinds of questions. Take a look. You should give them some dough to make this happen. It's important.